Category: Nonfiction

  • A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

    (by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling) I hadn’t heard of the Free Town Project before I started reading this book for nonfiction book club, and I also didn’t know a lot about bears in New Hampshire before reading this (though when I was a kid and my mom and I were somewhere near Mount Washington one summer, another…

  • Still Life with Remorse

    (by Maira Kalman) I read this aloud to/with my husband over the course of an afternoon and evening, and I think I enjoyed it more this way than I would have if I’d just read it on my own. Reading it aloud with someone else encouraged me to pause after each vignette (there are 39…

  • Winter Solstice

    (by Nina MacLaughlin) This is a book to read in one day—maybe ideally in one sitting, though I started it on my morning commute and finished it at home in the evening. It’s a book to read on or near the winter solstice, on a day when it gets dark early (sunset here in NYC…

  • Cathedrals of Industry

    (photographs by Michael L. Horowitz, text by James P. Holtje) Last month my husband and I went to an event at the 92nd Street Y where Michael Horowitz and Jim Holtje talked about this book (and about the larger subject of America’s “industrial past, present, and future”) with Paul Krugman and Esther Fuchs. I should…

  • Evicted

    (by Matthew Desmond) This book (which was published in 2016 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2017) follows eight families/households in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009. These families/households either have experienced/are experiencing eviction, or are living under threat of it. Some live in Milwaukee’s (mostly Black) North Side; others live in a…

  • Letters to His Neighbor

    (by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis) These 26 letters by Proust to his upstairs neighbors (most are to Mme Williams; a few are to her husband) were a quick and pleasing read. There are photographic reproductions of some of the letters interspersed throughout the text and wow I do not envy anyone trying to…

  • Ways of Seeing

    (by John Berger) I missed last month’s nonfiction book club meeting because I was in New Orleans to see Taylor Swift, but I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book for literally a decade, so I got it from the library anyway. I had been expecting a “how to look at art” kind of book,…

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

    (by Isabel Wilkerson) I missed this month’s nonfiction book club meeting because my husband and I had tickets to see Ethan Lipton’s “We Are Your Robots” in Brooklyn (which I thoroughly enjoyed), but I read the book anyway because it seemed like something I probably should have read already. This book came out 2020 and…

  • Heart: A History

    (by Sandeep Jauhar) I don’t normally gravitate to books about medicine/medical history, but someone chose this for nonfiction book club and I enjoyed it. Jauhar walks readers through the history of human understanding of/theories of the heart and circulatory system and various heart-related medical advances, while also telling the story of his own relationship with…

  • Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

    (by Danielle Dutton) In “Writing Advice,” a short piece toward the end of this book that reads like nonfiction until it suddenly doesn’t, one writer tells another to “write something with a real story and get it over two hundred pages” as opposed to “writing little books that nobody reads.” I, for one, quite like…